IT Sales & Marketing Intelligence vendor TechTarget enhanced its intent capabilities with Confirmed Projects, a set of verified projects obtained via direct interviews with a buying team member. Confirmed Projects are planned for the next twelve months and include purchase requirements, challenges, desired outcomes, location, timeframe, and the vendor short-list.
Confirmed Projects are available through TechTarget’s Priority EngineSales Intelligence service. Project contact data are triple verified (email, phone, and employment) along with the contacts’ role in the purchase process.
“Confirmed Projects include specific insights on the technical and business purchase considerations in-market accounts are looking to address — intelligence that will dramatically increase seller efficiency and productivity because they now know where and how to concentrate their efforts to get in on real deals,” stated the firm.
Priority Engine’s enhanced territory filtering helps sales reps home in on their best opportunities.
“Thousands of B2B sellers use Priority Engine every day to fuel their outbound efforts by discovering new active buyers in their territories plus prospect-level intent that helps them break through,” said CPO Andrew Briney. “The integration of Confirmed Projects into Priority Engine gives them a unique ability to attack and revive stalled mid-funnel opportunities with precise, actionable details on verified purchase plans.”
The value proposition of Priority Engine with Confirmed Projects
Drift’s chatbot now offers suggested replies, based on company marketing materials, to sales reps.
Conversational Cloud vendor Drift announced it had integrated OpenAI’s API into its chat service. The GPT integration suggests chat replies to sales reps, helping them answer complex customer questions. Responses are based on a company’s website content, marketing material, conversational context, and GPT.
Reps can choose to send the response verbatim, edit it before responding, or request a refined response.
“The ability to generate suggested replies by repurposing any available content also provides real-time on-the-job training for new sales reps (which currently takes three months on average), teaching them how to respond accurately and in the right brand voice,” explained the firm.
Drift listed a trio of capabilities it will be releasing later this year:
Automated content creation and ongoing optimization of playbooks
Automated onboarding and AI topic training
Personalizing sales outreach and prioritizing target accounts
“The buzz around ChatGPT, and the widespread experimentation that followed, has only underscored that conversation-based AI is paving the way of the future. But it needs to be tailored to solve meaningful business challenges,” said Matt Tippets, SVP at Drift. “With Drift’s ability to use Conversational AI to contextualize responses that augment the efforts of human teams, we’ve created a feature that helps sales reps of all experience levels be more productive, particularly relevant now with pressure on during a more difficult economic climate.”
Drift’s approach offers a human-in-the-loop option for sales chat that ensures responses are accurate and not subject to hallucinations.
“We have years of experience and real-life use cases that are already being applied to how we manage and bring GPT capabilities to our customers,” blogged Drift Senior Director of Product Marketing Aurelia Solomon. “And we’re excited to continue embedding GPT into our products for marketers and sellers to automate more of their workflows to save time and help them create quality pipeline, faster.”
Next Quarter, an AI-based Account Planning solution, partnered with Bombora to deliver third-party intent data to its Fortune 500 Clients. Next Quarter licensed Bombora’s Company Surge data to power its White Space offering. Next Quarter recommends the next best product to sell, “along with a guided path to uncover new growth opportunities.”
Bombora’s intent file helps identify in-market customers, including upsell and cross-sell opportunities, inside of Salesforce. Churn risk is also assessed.
Engagement (activity) data is gathered from Salesforce, so Next Quarter offers recommendations based on Bombora intent and account conversations.
Features include Account Chatter, Whitespace Analysis, Relationship Maps, Competitor Assessment, Target Setting, Scenario Planning & Gap Mitigation.
Next Quarter emphasizes white space opportunities at current accounts for B2B and B2G sales. Target industries include technology, pharma, management consulting, manufacturing, and Aerospace & Defense.
“Sales reps can uncover potential white space opportunities and develop tailored solutions to meet their needs by building strong relationships with current customers and understanding their business goals,” blogged the firm. “Next Quarter gathers data from your historical sales trends for similar customers. Using AI algorithms, we provide a score (NQ Score) by combining historical sales data with intent data that identifies the top recommended products or services to sell.”
Users can perform scenario analyses that identify and present next best product recommendations based on similar customer groupings.
“Next Quarter is committed to helping customers increase revenue,” said Next Quarter CEO Rahul Shah. “By combining our account planning solution with Bombora’s Intent data, we can offer a unique competitive edge to help drive account growth through AI-based recommendations leveraging intent. Next Quarter’s Account Growth module is an AI-based account planning solution that identifies new opportunities, finds decision-makers and influencers, and suggests guided next steps for sales teams to grow existing accounts.”
Next Quarter, formerly ForecastEra, received $7.3 million in seed and equity funding in 2021. It supports over 5,000 users and expects to quintuple its base over the next year.
Named accounts include Boeing, BASF, Bloomberg BNA, Dell, and NTT Data.
Pricing starts at $100 per user per month. Volume discounts kick in at 100 users.
Mary Shea was named co-CEO of Mediafly, where she will join Carson Conant in managing the Revenue Enablement company. Shea joins with a solid RevTech pedigree. She was a Principal Analyst at Forrester and Chief Evangelist at Outreach. Shea first met Conant as a newly minted Forrester Principal Analyst in 2015 and later served as a company advisor.
“I couldn’t be more thrilled to have Mary join us as co-CEO. I’ve known Mary for over a decade and have benefited immensely from her deep knowledge of the revenue enablement landscape, her prescience in identifying the next big trend, and her vision for the future of B2B buying and selling,” said Conant. “Mary brings deep empathy for the day-to-day challenges sellers face and a forward-leaning sensibility for the brand experience B2B companies need to create for buyers. She will be a force multiplier for the Mediafly team and our customers.”
Shea argued that the RevTech unicorns “amassed large financial war chests” that helped them develop market recognition but that Mediafly and Boathouse Capital took a slower “Midwest approach” that relied more on individual investors than institutional funds.
“While this non-traditional route likely cost Mediafly some market recognition, today this ‘Midwest’ approach appears wise,” argued Shea. “Fast-forward to the past 6-10 months. As competitors and adjacents hunkered down and paused innovation to slow ‘burn’ to avoid ‘down rounds,’ Carson and the Mediafly team quietly acquired and integrated five companies — revenue intelligence provider InsightSquared, conversation intelligence providers ExecVision and Sonero, the enablement workflow solution, UserIQ, and talent intelligence provider Aptology.”
These acquisitions brought together underfunded assets with “great and complementary tech and talent” but which “lacked robust distribution channels,” argued Shea.
While Mediafly emphasized its contrarian approach, it is not immune to the layoff bug. It confirmed layoffs last Friday, attributing them to post-acquisition efficiencies, not the current tech slowdown.
“Today, the pendulum swings in the other direction as we made the difficult decision to let go of a number of talented individuals to achieve the efficiency desired after an intense year of acquisitions and integrations,” posted Conant on LinkedIn. “With these actions, Mediafly will be in a strong position as a uniquely profitable, revenue enablement company.”
Conant listed three organizational goals: “an unwavering commitment” to its customers, product innovation and category leadership, and profitability and operational excellence. Mediafly did not indicate the scope of the layoffs.
Mediafly offers a set of modules that can be purchased as standalone solutions or as part of an integrated suite. Functionality includes enterprise content management, revenue and conversation intelligence, value realization, coaching, deal management, and forecasting. To supplement this functionality, it developed a partnership ecosystem spanning seventy-five solutions across the RevTech space.
Mediafly has acquired six RevTech companies to build out its platform quickly. In 2022, it acquired and integrated revenue intelligence platform InsightSquared, conversation intelligence provider ExecVision, and talent intelligence provider Aptology.
Mediafly noted that customers are increasingly consolidating their tech stack with Mediafly while reducing their technology spend by thirty percent or more and enjoying “improved revenue team performance.”
Customers include PepsiCo, Nestle, Databricks, Honeywell, Sealed Air, Zscaler, and TransUnion.
“I’ve watched Mediafly for many years and always thought of the company as a hidden gem. Mediafly has grown organically and through acquisitions and has quietly compiled the most complete revenue enablement platform in the market — everything B2B teams need to successfully navigate today’s complex buying journey,” said Shea. “With this push towards a unified revenue enablement platform, it’s now time for Mediafly to step out of the background and help more B2B organizations create confident sellers who can deliver efficient predictable growth. I’m hitting the ground running — if you’re looking to improve seller effectiveness, buyer engagement, or consolidate your tech stack, take a fresh look at Mediafly.”
Shea announced the following goals over the next few months:
Expand and deepen the value we deliver to customers.
Partner with more large global brands.
Rebrand and rename our company.
Create provocative and actionable thought leadership.
Innovate through organic and inorganic product development.
Shea sees the RevTech industry at a “critical and exciting crossroads which includes the rise of digital buying and selling, sweeping generational shifts, rapid technological advancement, the proliferation of tools focused on efficiency, and market and tool consolidation.”
To compete in this dynamic environment, Mediafly “will continue to build onto our platform, integrating each new asset through a modern and scalable data architecture, complete with a revenue business intelligence layer.” As a result, Mediafly’s Revenue360 solution will become “the most complete revenue enablement platform in the market.”
Vendors are quickly moving to integrate generative AI into their offerings. This week, Qualified and Clari announced ChatGPT functionality. Qualified GPT, which the firm describes as “Generative AI for the Pipeline Cloud,” helps B2B vendors “harness the power of AI and engage and convert their website visitors at scale.” The firm views ChatGPT as a “new platform on top of which we will build the next version of Qualified.”
When launched four years ago, Qualified focused on predictive modeling and Predictive AI to identify buying intent signals, particularly those generated from website data.
“At Qualified, our core philosophy has always been to provide the most powerful approach to pipeline generation using a combination of people, data, and automation,” said CEO Kraig Swensrud. “With the rapid advancements in Generative AI, we will be able to provide even more robust automation to our customers, allowing them to scale their efforts, focus on their highest priority tasks, and ultimately crush their pipeline and revenue targets.”
Qualified GPT supports generative text apps that automate engagement prompting, copywriting, messaging, and chatbots. Initial features include:
Auto Pounce: Automatically sends engagement prompts (or “greetings”) that serve as conversation starters for website visitors that fall within a firm’s ICP.
Auto Correct: Qualified GPT corrects misspellings, fixes grammar errors, and proofreads responses, “helping your sales reps deliver speedy, professional responses.”
Auto Tune: Enhances rep dialogue while chatting “to sound more eloquent when speaking to potential buyers, helping every rep strike just the right tone with their important customers.”
Auto Expand: Reps can enter a few words or bullet points, and Qualified GPT will craft professional messages.
Auto Suggest: AI-powered recommended conversation responses that keep reps on message and speed up response times.
Auto Translate: Translates messages, displaying both questions and answers in the customer and sales rep’s language.
Auto Personalize: Changes or recommends website text “based on visitor data to drive the highest engagement and conversion.”
Auto Summarize: Summarizes conversations and website behavior, providing sales reps with a “succinct read out of Account activity to date.”
Qualified GPT will be rolled out as a “limited release to a subset of Pipeline Cloud customers this spring.”
My plan yesterday was to deal with the sale of my house (open house Sunday with contract offers yesterday), but I couldn’t fully focus on that as important announcements were coming from Europe: B2B full-funnel marketing vendor Anteriad bought Demand Generation vendor BNZSA. Separately, Sales Intelligence and B2B data vendor Echobot, which merged with Visitor Intelligence platform Leadfeeder last year, rebranded as Dealfront and launched its new platform.
Both BNZSA and Dealfront emphasize the diversity of the European market and their ability to meet market needs across national boundaries with localized support and GDPR compliance.
BNZSA, a Madrid-based demand generation firm, has been on a tear the last few years, growing several hundred percent per annum through H1 2022 (H2 growth data was not announced). BNZSA provides Anteriad with a solid foundation for global marketing and GDPR-compliant data. In addition, it offers B2B demand generation services to over fifty multinational clients, including Oracle, SAP, Acer, Dell, and Fujitsu.
BNZSA’s team offers local market expertise and campaign support in 26 languages.
“The combination of Anteriad and BNZSA provides an industry-leading offering of B2B demand generation products and services to clients across the globe,” stated Anteriad. “The acquisition of BNZSA will enable Anteriad to expand its international data coverage by integrating BNZSA’s unique GDPR-compliant data. Bringing together Anteriad’s intent data, account-based marketing, analytics, and performance marketing capabilities and BNZSA’s tele-based conversion-oriented services will provide differentiated, full-funnel B2B demand generation capabilities at a global scale supported by regional and local leadership and talent.”
MeritB2B rebranded as Anteriad in April 2021 after a series of acquisitions that expanded the company’s scope. It previously acquired several MarTech firms, including intent-data vendor True Influence (Nov 2021), ABM MarTech and Audience vendor 180byTwo (Nov 2020), and B2B data vendor Compass Marketing (Jan 2020).
“Anteriad is a company that’s ahead of its time and ahead of the market. Our positioning directly reflects our focus on being uniquely able to provide our customers the solutions they need to get ahead and take the lead,” said Anteriad CEO Rob Sanchez in 2021.
Anteriad had strong growth last year, with a 15% increase in US new customer wins and 30% globally through Mid-September. The firm enjoys loyal customers with an average retention rate of eight years. Furthermore, multi-service clients generate more than 60% of revenue, “showing the value of a full-funnel partner versus point solutions.”
The BNZSA acquisition “brings together Anteriad’s intent data, account-based marketing, analytics, and performance marketing capabilities and BNZSA’s tele-based conversion-oriented services,” providing multinational customers a “differentiated, full-funnel B2B demand generation capabilities at a global scale supported by regional and local leadership and talent.”
“BNZSA, powered by Anteriad,” will act as Anteriad’s international and EMEA headquarters. BNZSA adds three hundred employees who specialize in ABM and multi-touch campaigns. BNZSA supports programmatic display based on its firmographic, technographic, and intent datasets. Its customers can build integrated multi-channel marketing programs that leverage BNZSA’s EMEA-based, multi-lingual contact center. As leads are generated, BNZSA staff offers a “Warm Handover” process which ensures that leads are appropriately transitioned to sales teams.
Anteriad CPO Ken Lordy described the acquisition to GZ Consulting as a “highly complementary combination of data and technology assets with full-funnel campaign management.” Consequently, the combined firms “now serve the full funnel demand generation needs of all our marketing clients at a truly global scale.”
Continued Lordy, “BNZSA’s services include native language speaking BDRs at one of the largest call centers in EMEA, ensuring an individualized approach and understanding of each market’s distinct local customs.”
BNZSA identifies potential prospects for its customers, surrounds them with “messaging and brand awareness,” and collects engagement metrics that inform content development and enhance BNZSA’s prospect engagement. BNZSA tracks interest and intent and maintains an ongoing dialogue with prospects. Nurturing includes the period between contacting prospects and providing a ‘Warm Handover’ of leads to account executives.
“Following this approach has a positive uplift in conversions to our Warm Handover Process, where BNZSA agents broker, arrange, and moderate a call between the prospect and our customer’s sales or product specialist,” said Paul Briggs, BNZSA Director of Global Corporate Development in 2021. “This ultimately boosts closed-won opportunities for our customers up to 300%.”
BNZSA digital services include SEO strategy, performance marketing/SEM, email marketing, content marketing, content syndication, marketing automation, and UX and CX design.
“BNZSA understands the individualized approach and distinct local customs of each market it serves,” said Anteriad. “BNZSA’s nuance in culture across regions includes BDRs that speak over 26 native languages at one of the largest call centers in EMEA.”
The combined company offers “data, technology, and a differentiated high-touch client service model” that supports “rich B2B demand generation and ABM solutions and in-market customization at global scale.”
BNZSA CEO Brahim Samhoud maintains a “significant ownership stake in the combined business.” He will report directly to Sanchez. Samhoud emphasized that both companies have a client obsession that “will take B2B marketing to a whole new level, driven by data and technology, powered by people.”
“Anteriad means to ‘Get in Front’, and acquiring BNZSA delivers on that philosophy. By expanding our global reach through this acquisition, Anteriad establishes itself as a true global leader in tech-enabled B2B marketing solutions. BNZSA brings an extremely talented leadership team and a differentiated offering that is made even more valuable by their local presence in key markets around the world,” said Sanchez. “Leadership at Anteriad and BNZSA are both invested in our people, our clients, and our growth. With this solid foundation, we will accomplish remarkable things for our clients in the global B2B marketing community.”
Postal ABM supports both programmatic and strategic ABM campaigns with triggered events and gifting.
Offline Engagement Platform Postal announced the general availability of Postal ABM, its offline engagement feature for one-to-many programmatic ABM campaigns. The new capability helps marketers programmatically target and engage valued accounts and audiences in a one-to-many approach based on intent and CRM data to “personalize content at scale.” Marketers can also execute Strategic ABM campaigns that target high-priority ABM accounts.
Postal ABM is “designed to make it easy to programmatically target and engage key accounts and audiences with offline campaigns,” Postal VP of Marketing Lauren Alt-Kishpaugh explained to GZ Consulting. “It’s designed for marketers running enterprise playbooks who need to scale offline engagement across their go-to-market strategy.”
Postal ABM supports built-in engagement and ROI dashboards that help sales and marketing teams “make informed decisions during the campaign and throughout the lifecycle of target accounts,” blogged Postal Product Marketing Manager Amy Schwartz.
The new Postal Engage feature triggers items and experiences to a group of contacts based on ABM signals in Salesforce. Marketers can set budgets and timelines for campaigns and track campaign success (e.g., accounts engaged, revenue generated) in Postal and Salesforce. Postal syncs its Account Engagement data with Salesforce for “better target discovery and ROI tracking.”
Postal also supports integrating physical touchpoints for virtual events. Postal claims an 80% attendance rate by automating offline marketing activities after events. For example, gifts can be sent to virtual event attendees, tradeshow badge swipers, or free trial participants. Postal also proposed sending a congratulations gift when champions change jobs.
In other news, Postal also announced that it partnered with ZoomInfo to support GTM Plays. Use cases include turning an abandoned chat follow-up into a booked meeting, welcoming a prospect back from OOO, congratulating a champion or decision maker on a promotion, and strategic prospecting campaigns.
“In today’s digital economy, it can be easy to forget the importance of offline and physical sales strategies…think back to in-person experiences such as steak dinners and golf outings with prospects,” blogged Postal Content Marketing Manager Rich Pusateri. “That was the standard practice. Now, in the world of remote selling, using custom branded kits or personalized gifts with handwritten notes in tandem with digital engagement is a proven way to make a positive impact on your bottom line.”
6sense Revenue AI for Sales helps prioritize account activity.
6sense released Revenue AI for Sales, its account prioritization platform that identifies in-market accounts and recommends contacts in an “anonymous world.” The service assists reps with prioritization, research, multi-threading, and personalization.
“Information overload is killing sellers’ productivity. In today’s rapidly changing business landscape, we need to give sellers the tools they need to reach new heights. This means giving sellers sales technology that helps them spend more time selling and less time on unproductive activities,” said CEO Jason Zintak. “We’ve already transformed marketing teams by revealing and targeting accounts and engaging anonymous buyers. Now we’re giving sales teams a massive upgrade from their legacy database vendors. This puts 6sense in a new category where we can innovate and lead, just like we have with others like predictive analytics and ABM. Early momentum from customers making the move to a better selling experience demonstrates the potential for impact.”
The Persona Map identifies engagement activity by role and level.
Revenue AI for Sales illuminates the “Dark Funnel,” where 97% of B2B research is conducted anonymously. 6sense ties new buyer intent signals with account and contact intelligence. Recommended Actions prioritize engagement and suggest which contacts to acquire and reach out to. 6sense offers first-party (visitor), second-party (G2 and TrustRadius), and third-party (Bombora) intent signals. It supports both topic and keyword intent alongside buying stage.
A Persona Map provides a visual map of the buying team, helping promote multi-threading and suggesting unknown buying team members. The map includes contact details, activities, and talking points.
People and company pages highlight company hierarchies, job insights, technographics, and psychographics. Contacts and accounts can be sent to CRMs, pushed to SEPs for engagement, and contacted via email, phone, or LinkedIn.
6sense insights are supported by a Chrome extension, allowing reps to prospect on the open web and identify potential buyers.
Prioritization Dashboards highlight in-market accounts and insights. 6sense also alerts reps to important account activity, recommended actions, and new buyer intent signals via email and Slack.
“Challenges exist on multiple fronts today as sellers have to navigate through a constant barrage of information and noise, plummeting productivity and increasing frustration,” said CTO Viral Bajaria. “With our AI-driven solution, sales teams will be able to focus on what they do best – building relationships and closing deals – while our technology takes care of the rest. 6sense Revenue AI for Sales uses the power of AI, big data, and intelligence to give sellers confidence in their ability to close more deals and be the trusted advisor their customers want and need.”
6sense maintained its momentum last year, growing revenue by 70%. The company attributed its ongoing growth to its “strategic focus on new product introductions, market expansion, and ecosystem growth.”
New product introductions included the October release of Conversational Email. The module, which leverages Generative AI, intent, and pre-intent data, dramatically enhances productivity when sending marketing and sales emails and fielding responses. Conversational email composes “relevant and hyper-personalized emails to qualify and convert leads at scale.” 6sense claims its customers enjoy a 50 percent reduction in deal-cycle time, a 150% increase in average deal size, and $900K of new pipeline activity in four weeks.
“The results of the past year’s performance are a major achievement that demonstrates how the team’s hard work has paid off,” said Brian Ascher, Partner at Venrock. “As 6sense continues executing against commitments and the product roadmap, we expect to see this upward trend maintain its momentum. This is what the larger investor community loves to see, and we are proud of the 6sense team delivering these results.”
Other enhancements include ongoing investment in the Slintel database and the release of 6sense Pipeline Intelligence based on Fortella. Both Slintel and Fortella were acquired in H2 2021.
“6sense offers billions of data points of market-leading account and contact data along with best-in-class curated data, enhancing a customer’s own first-party data sources and tech stacks to deliver powerful B2B go-to-market strategies, insights, and orchestrations,” claimed the firm.
6sense continued to grow its partner ecosystem with new integrations, including HubSpot, Microsoft, and Integrate. In addition, its integrations with Dynamics and HubSpot CRM support prescriptive sales dashboards and buyer insights.
“Throughout the past year, we’ve built upon our growth in meaningful ways and continue to provide our customers with tangible value that impacts their bottom line,” said 6sense CEO Jason Zintak. “Using our own platform is essential to our success and puts us in a unique position where 6sense Revenue AI is a competitive advantage – both in our own category and where our customers compete. Looking across our customer base, we see revenue generation is 120% more effective when using 6sense, their deal size doubles, and win rate increases 4X.”
The firm has expanded internationally over the past year with an increasing presence in EMEA and APAC. The London office grew to 45 full-time employees, and APAC has over 400 employees in India and Singapore.
Both services provide keyword intent, with Standalone Intent delivered to third-party platforms. (Source: Demandbase)
ABX PlatformDemandbase, which also offers a data cloud and sales intelligence solution, rolled out its keyword intent dataset for third-party platforms. Demandbase Intent is available both inside the Demandbase One platform (embedded) and delivered to other platforms (standalone). Demandbase Intent joins Demandbase’s other Data Cloud assets, including firmographics, technographics, and contacts.
Standalone Intent, which supports 375,000 keywords and ingests 18 billion daily signals, provides buying signals for predictive models, data stores, and analytics. Data is delivered via API, cloud delivery, or CSV flat files.
New keywords are added weekly, with historical intent maintained for twelve months.
Demandbase Intent helps marketing teams target in-market accounts and refine their messaging. Furthermore, Demandbase Intent can trigger campaigns, avoid churn, and expand accounts.
“Our intent takes multiple sources into account, providing a much stronger and more accurate signals than others in the space,” said Demandbase VP of Product and Industry Marketing Jackie Palmer. “By using Demandbase Intent, data scientists, corporate strategists, and sales and marketing analytics professionals can build and improve their predictive models, helping them to better understand buyers’ goals and navigate the anonymous buying journey. As they identify patterns, trends, and opportunities, they can be more precise in prioritizing accounts and gaining deeper insight into their revenue potential.”
Demandbase claims that its keyword library provides superior targeting compared to taxonomically-based intent datasets, allowing vendors to target niche industries and segments, track competitor offerings, and dovetail on partners’ intent. Furthermore, customers can add new keywords “to fit their needs, whereas other intent providers limit customers to a finite, predefined list of topics.” They can then feed keyword intent to their data lakes, data warehouses, or business intelligence platforms, making the intent data available to data scientists for propensity-to-buy models.
Palmer told data scientists, “What you can do is build your…propensity-to-buy models, all the different things you need for predictive analytics around your account intent activities. You can stream that directly into your CRM systems, marketing automation systems, or any go-to-market systems that you need to.”
Demandbase Intent can be used alongside other intent datasets. Demandbase One also supports Bombora’s third-party intent, G2 second-party technology research intent, website visitor intelligence, and other datasets licensed by its Demandbase customers.
“Our mantra is the more intent data, the better,” Palmer explained to GZ Consulting. “So, that’s why within the platform, we always integrate with Bombora, G2, etc. But this is now for standalone people that may not want the Demandbase platform but also want to add additional concepts of intent into their data lakes [and] data warehouses.”
Furthermore, keyword intent is “totally complementary” to taxonomic intent data sources.
The Demandbase AI assesses keyword usage and the age of the article (older articles provide higher relevance), related articles the user has read, and “rare and hyper-qualifying keywords and themes to identify personas and buying committee roles.”
“We track the relevant articles,” explained Demandbase Data Cloud Product Marketer Imran Ahmed to GZ Consulting. “If you want to look at how the market does it, they do it through co-ops. They do it through metatags. We’re doing it through articles that help us identify not only the keywords but help us gather all the users looking at those keywords across the web. That brings up signal relevance and helps us get more granular and more exposure.”
Demandbase Intent does not look at Google search terms but looks a layer deeper at which articles are being viewed.
“Demandbase intent data is based on years of AI research and delivers more breadth and relevance than any you’ll find anywhere else. Why? Because we own the technology to identify anonymous accounts and pair that with our direct access to the bidstream — the source for the most intent signals. Then we beef up the relevance of those signals using a combination of AI and natural language processing.”
Standalone intent is priced per keyword.
Standalone intent has been generally available since December and already has several clients. However, due to the calendar, the firm held off on announcing the service until late January.
Demandbase Intent by the Numbers (Source: Demandbase)
Asynchronous video vendor Vidyard announced the appointment of Jonathan Lister as its new COO. Lister joins from LinkedIn, where he served as VP of Global Sales Solutions. Prior to LinkedIn, Lister was the Country Manager for Google Canada and held multiple executive positions at AOL.
“We’re incredibly excited to welcome Jonathan to the Vidyard team,” said Vidyard CEO Michael Litt. “His unique experience as a global leader at LinkedIn will be a tremendous asset as we build on our mission to empower every go-to-market professional with the tools and knowledge they need to be successful in the new world of digital customer communication.”
While at LinkedIn, Lister increased the division’s customer base to one million users paying $1,000 per year for Sales Navigator.
“So, he drove it to a billion dollars a year in revenue,” said Litt. “And we have the same user — the sales professional using video to communicate with their customers.”
“The next stage is, how do we commercialize and value at scale?” continued Litt. “And that is exactly what Jonathan is here to help us with.”
Video adoption remains strong among sales and marketing organizations. According to Demand Metric’s 2022 State of Video Report, 82% of go-to-market teams report that video is becoming increasingly important when connecting with buyers. Furthermore, 70% of sales reps stated that video converts better than other content formats.
“There are few SalesTech companies that are truly focused on empowering the individual sales professional,” said Lister. “That’s really what drew me to Vidyard. I believe the company is uniquely positioned in that its products can be used by any go-to-market professional in the world to impact every stage of the customer journey. I’m looking forward to building on Vidyard’s strong momentum and reputation as a world-class provider of sales technology and community education.”
Vidyard also provided a summary of its 2022 enhancements
Video Templates: Video Templates guide sellers on how to use videos across various including getting in front of a new prospect, recording a custom demo, or closing out a deal. Video Templates include sample scripts, example videos, recording tips, and related best practices. There are also community-contributed templates from Shari Levitan, Sales Gravy, Katherine Caldwell, Todd Caponi, and Salesloft.
Enhanced Editing: Enhanced video trimming and cutting features.
Video Chapters: Add chapters to mark specific topics and improved navigation.
Salesloft Insights Integration:Salesloft users can discover which prospects are watching their videos natively within Salesloft. Vidyard video views are surfaced within the Salesloft activity feed to “empower sellers with timely customer insights.”
Sales Feed Learning Hub: Vidyard launched a new learning hub, accessible within the Vidyard app, powered by its Sales Feed media network. Vidyard users can access sales learning content, including cold calling, prospecting, discovery and qualification, negotiation and proposals, and selling with video.
“Our singular focus with Sales Feed is to help B2B sales professionals learn, laugh, and live a better life in sales,” said Tyler Lessard, VP of Marketing at Vidyard and Head of Sales Feed. “The response we’ve received from our community has been nothing short of incredible, and we’re thrilled to put our top-rated content into the hands of every Vidyard user. At the end of the day, if we can help one more sales rep close one more deal – and feel good about how they did it – we feel like we’ve done our jobs.”
Litt argued that field sales reps were already in decline in 2020 and that “the pandemic basically killed field selling,” The pandemic forced firms to sell remotely, benefiting Vidyard, which offered a personalized communications channel that allowed sales reps to stand out in the inbox.
“That story played out again, and again, and again,” said Litt. “That enabled us to accelerate our trajectory through to profitability, invest as much as we could back into [research and development], and totally embrace this video messaging story.”
Vidyard now supports 12 million business professionals at 250,000 companies. At this point, the firm can either operate on a cash flow neutral basis or be more aggressive to foster growth.
Vidyard has not had a funding round since 2019, as the firm did not look for an “insane valuation.” Litt said, “[this] means not doing big financial raises at crazy valuations because we want our employees to have upside. We want all of our stakeholders to be engaged with the same outcome.”
Litt said Vidyard has been “judicious” about its spending. The CEO noted that the company has kept its focus on retaining “really strong delta option value,” adding, “[this] means not doing big financial raises at crazy valuations because we want our employees to have upside [and] we want all of our stakeholders to be engaged with the same outcome.”
Although the firm did not state its current revenue, Litt sees $100 million as Vidyard’s “next meaningful milestone.”
Litt sees a great opportunity in asynchronous video. Vidyard’s R&D efforts center around more compelling video content, including AI assistance to improve content efficacy.
As firms face a challenging market, Litt is eyeing potential acquisitions, “especially in the next couple of quarters as businesses look for a soft landing. We think there’s going to be some opportunities to pick up some interesting tech to better complete our vision, and again, come out of this cycle with a really, really amazing suite of products that benefit our go-to-market teams.”
With firms cutting travel budgets during the recession, demand for Vidyard should remain strong. “Fortunes are built in bear markets and harvested in bull markets, and we’re in a bear market. But we have the balance sheet and financials to invest heavily in product and value for our users,” said Litt.
